4 ms·

Wolfram's theory was already very politely but firmly shown to be wrong 20 years ago, by people who took a look into it. Scott Aaronson for example. https://arx

Wolfram's theory was already very politely but firmly shown to be wrong 20 years ago, by people who took a look into it. Scott Aaronson for example. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

athrowaway3z 6y ago
If i understand it correctly (which is doubtful), in section 2, the cellular automaton conjecture is dismissed because 110 as a computer suffers from exponential slowdown. >"To prove that 110 is NP-complete, what is needed is to show that Rule 110 allows efficient simulation of Turing machines" But if the universe is a 'computation', then the efficiency of it doesn't really matter right? Similar to creating a Blender rendering, it doesn't matter how long each frame takes to render compared to any other frame, as long as the observer sees a smooth sequence of images.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  If you have a simulated virtual world completely isolated from the real world, does it matter if you simulate it at normal speed or 1/1,000th speed to the ones inside the simulation? I think not. We already see this with existing simulations, though they are of much simpler objects than conscious beings. If I simulate water sloshing in a bucket, it doesn't matter how long the simulation runs, the results are the same. Now, I may add in short cuts to make it closer to real time to support practical applications which leads to different results, but a slower machine running the same shortcuts will see the same differences.
smsx 6y ago
As far as I understand it, his hypergraph based theory we're reading about here is different from the cellular automata ideas in New Kind of Science?
- Nokinside 6y ago
  Wolfram's theory or basic ideas don't change when he switches representation from cellular automata to hypergraph.
alentist 6y ago
If I understand correctly, condition 4 (see page 104) no longer holds. The new theory, in contrast to the old theory (see bottom of page 100), seems to be a multiway system.

athrowaway3z 6y ago

If i understand it correctly (which is doubtful), in section 2, the cellular automaton conjecture is dismissed because 110 as a computer suffers from exponential slowdown. >"To prove that 110 is NP-complete, what is needed is to show that Rule 110 allows efficient simulation of Turing machines" But if the universe is a 'computation', then the efficiency of it doesn't really matter right? Similar to creating a Blender rendering, it doesn't matter how long each frame takes to render compared to any other frame, as long as the observer sees a smooth sequence of images.

SkyBelow 6y ago
If you have a simulated virtual world completely isolated from the real world, does it matter if you simulate it at normal speed or 1/1,000th speed to the ones inside the simulation? I think not. We already see this with existing simulations, though they are of much simpler objects than conscious beings. If I simulate water sloshing in a bucket, it doesn't matter how long the simulation runs, the results are the same. Now, I may add in short cuts to make it closer to real time to support practical applications which leads to different results, but a slower machine running the same shortcuts will see the same differences.

smsx 6y ago

As far as I understand it, his hypergraph based theory we're reading about here is different from the cellular automata ideas in New Kind of Science?

Nokinside 6y ago
Wolfram's theory or basic ideas don't change when he switches representation from cellular automata to hypergraph.

alentist 6y ago

If I understand correctly, condition 4 (see page 104) no longer holds. The new theory, in contrast to the old theory (see bottom of page 100), seems to be a multiway system.